Peace and Justice Post

RINF.COM, Monday, June 30th, 2008

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

Iraqi government officials on Sunday criticized the American military for two recent attacks in which soldiers killed people who the government said were civilians.

One death occurred during a raid by American soldiers on Friday near Karbala; two days earlier, three people described by the Interior Ministry as bank employees on their way to work were shot and killed near the Baghdad airport when they tried to pass an American convoy.

An Iraqi government statement demanded that the soldiers be held accountable in Iraq. The issue is particularly delicate now because the two countries are negotiating a long-term security agreement and among the chief points of disagreement are whether the American military will be free to conduct operations and detain suspects and whether, if its soldiers kill civilians, they will have immunity from Iraqi law.

Currently soldiers can only be tried under American military law. However, there have been many shootings of Iraqi civilians by American soldiers and contractors, prompting Iraqi politicians to demand that they have a right to prosecute soldiers and contractors in their courts.

The reaction to the latest deaths signals that the Iraqi government is likely to push hard on the issue in the negotiations. These two shootings “are a violation of the law and an encroachment on Iraqi sovereignty,” said a statement from the General Command of the Iraqi armed forces. “We demand the coalition force to arrest their employees and refer them to the judiciary because their crimes were committed in cold blood.”

Continued . . .

John Pilger | Socialist Worker, July 1, 2008

THE BRITISH lawyer Gareth Peirce, celebrated for her defense of miscarriage of justice victims, wrote recently: “Over the years of the conflict, every lawless action on the part of the British state provoked a similar reaction: internment, ‘shoot to kill,’ the use of torture…brutally obtained false confessions and fabricated evidence. This was registered by the community most affected, but the British public, in whose name these actions were taken, remained ignorant.”

Referring to the conflict in Northern Ireland, she was drawing a comparison with “our new suspect community,” people of Muslim faith, against whom a vicious, sectarian and mostly unreported war is well under way.

As Peirce points out, “internment, discredited and abandoned in Northern Ireland,” now allows, not 42 days, but the “indefinite detention without trial of foreign nationals, the ‘evidence’ to be heard in secret with the detainee’s lawyer not permitted to see the evidence against him.”

Those snatched from their homes in Britain following September 11, 2001, have all but vanished into an Anglo-American gulag, which in this country joins Belmarsh Prison, where people are consigned to oblivion, with Broadmoor psychiatric prison, where they are sent as they go mad, and with Kafkaesque versions of “home” where others are interred under “control orders.”

One such home prisoner, wrote Peirce, “a man without arms, was left alone and terrified, unable to leave the flat or to contact anyone without committing a criminal offense, subject to a curfew and allowed no visits unless approved in advance by the Home Office.” Going into the garden, arranging a plumber, speaking to a child’s teacher, all require permission. The families go mad, too.

Preferring “a quick death…to a slow death here,” one man who took a risk and returned to Algeria has been lost in the subcontracted gulag, where his new torturers have given the British government “assurances” and are themselves reassured by the fact that BP, the ethical oil company, has sunk $12 billion into getting oil out of Algeria’s Southern Sahara. Jordan, another subcontractor, is held economically afloat by the U.S. so George W. Bush’s “renditions” and torture can proceed there.

No British court has found any of these people guilty of any crime, but as Tony Blair, a genuine prima facie criminal, put it so well, “the rules of the game have changed.”

Continued . . .

By Thalif Deen | Inter Press Service News

Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, addresses a press conference concerning his findings during a country-wide visit to the U.S. Credit:UN Photo/Devra Berkowitz

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 30 (IPS) – After a two-week fact-finding tour of U.S. prison and detention facilities, a U.N. human rights investigator has blasted the administration of President George W. Bush for a rash of shortcomings in the country’s flawed justice system and continued violations of the rule of law.

Unleashing a stinging barrage of attacks, Professor Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extra-judicial, summary and arbitrary executions, singles out the existence of racism in the application of the death penalty in the United States, and the lack of transparency in the deaths of prisoners in the Guantanamo Bay detention facility housing suspected terrorists.

Alston, a professor at the New York University School of Law and an outspoken critic of human rights abuses worldwide, also complains about the non-availability of information on civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the refusal of the U.S. Justice Department to prosecute private security contractors who commit unlawful killings.

During his 14-day tour of the United States at the invitation of the administration, he met with federal and state officials, judges and civil society groups in New York, Washington DC, Alabama and Texas.

Alston was particularly critical of the state of Texas which has refused to review the cases of foreign nationals on death row, most of whom had been deprived of the right to consular assistance from their home countries.

Continued . . .

An Israeli attack would be disastrous, but sanctions won’t work. Dialogue with the US is our best hope of avoiding a nuclear Iran

• 
• • Shirley Williams
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday June 30, 2008

I share Jonathan Freedland‘s concern about the danger of an attack by Israel on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and the catastrophic consequences likely to follow. A military attack on Iran could not be a copy of the “surgical strike” against the Osirik reactor in Iraq in 1981. Natanz is close to a large new oil refinery and to Isfahan, Iran’s magnificent world heritage city. The “collateral damage” from a military strike, to use the dry language of the military that describes the destruction of human beings and of history, would be terrible.

It is not yet clear that Iran wants a nuclear weapon. It is certainly quite a long way from achieving one on its own. It stubbornly affirms its right, under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, to enrich uranium for civil energy purposes. What is absolutely clear, as Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the IAEA, has repeatedly said, is that it wants the recognition and respect its long, proud history and its role in the region deserve. That has to mean, sooner or later, recognition by the US. The absence of any diplomatic relations for 28 years between these two countries has contributed hugely to mutual misunderstanding.

Freedland’s recommendation for preventing Iran developing nuclear weapons is “sharper sticks and juicier carrots”. The present sharp sticks are not very sharp. On a recent week-long visit to Iran, I could find few consequences of sanctions except difficulty in using credit cards – and even that was got around by the more enterprising traders, who had set up an effective bypass via the ever helpful Dubai. Financial sanctions on trade and investment would be more effective but open to even more evasion by those disinclined to cooperate.

As for juicier carrots, the offer of US engagement in negotiations in return for a freeze on (rather than a suspension of) nuclear enrichment might just work. Even then, time would be needed to establish a dialogue with Iran’s complex layers of leadership. The US should ask the shaky government of Israel, in return for years of loyal American support, to stay its hand.